I have been wrestling with the keyboard on my laptop since I got it last spring, and this is actually a test to see if there is a happy ending... The curser would jump all over the place making typing a constant exercise in craziness, and the more I investigated this problem through the various help sites the more complicated it seemed. Some suggestions included disabling the mouse pad, but have you ever tried to find out how to do this through the search function in Windows 8? My daughter also had a new laptop (different brand) and was having the same problem. Eventually she simply attached an external keyboard. So today I set out to do the same thing, and ended up at Future Shop where one of the youngsters showed me another way.

Those function keys at the top have little blue pictures on them, and it turns out that they can be activated via the function button at the bottom. There is one with a picture of a mouse pad and a tiny hand pointing to how to turn it off. So now my mouse pad is off, and so far the only wildly erratic typing happening is by me. well la de da!